CSIRO have completed short term water supply & demand modelling for Western Australia covering the next twenty years and the scenario is frightening. Surface water running into dams & rivers could reduce by up to 50%, the Gnangara Mound faces a one third decline by 2030 and rainfall is expected to fall by another 7% after falling by 15% since 1970. With the forecast extreme climate changes and significant population growth there could be a water deficit of 250 gigalitres per annum. Unless energy costs fall significantly, converting sea water to drinkable water will mean much higher costs for our water.

Market forces will probably lead to adaptation in the way that West Australians live, particularly in relation to the size and design of our dwellings and their garden surroundings. Lawns & European style gardens will need to make way for desert, Mexican & native gardens as well as synthetic lawns.

After one of the hottest summers on record it is worth consider how we might better adapt our building designs for houses, offices and factories to the fierce Western Australian heat. Termite mounds provide a great example of how insects engineer their living quarters to ensure survival in hot climates.

The typical termite mound must accommodate millions of inhabitants together with their fungus gardens. Termites cannot digest the cellulose from the wood that they collect so they use the wood as a food for fungus to grow on & then eat the fungus. These fungus gardens need a stable environment in which to grow and so constant humidity and temperature is a must.

Initially it was believed that termite mounds act as a giant chimney, filtering out the CO2 from the wasps & the fungus gardens. A typical mound needs to 'breathe' 1000 litres of fresh air per day. However, recent research has demonstrated that the real ventilation is driven through the walls of the termite mound which are porous. Termite mounds tap turbulence in the gusts of wind that hit them. A single breath of wind contains small eddies and currents that vary with speed & direction with different frequencies. As the range of frequencies changes from gust to gust, the boundary between the stale air in the nest and the fresh air from outside moves about within the mounds' walls, allowing the two bodies of air to be exchanged. In essence, the mound functions as a giant lung.

As termites do not need any electricity to run the heating, cooling and ventilation on their buildings, their designs are worth paying attention to, especially if we want to continue developing our civilization in Western Australia, one of the hottest driest spots on the planet.

Ok, so this report is actually in relation to Europe but we can consider it relevant to the future of education in Western Australia too.

Click to access the Learning Spaces report

Physicists from leading astronomy research countries including China, USA, France, Germany and India have committed to the development of a $160 million gravitational wave detector at Gingin, 1hour north of Perth. The detector will be finished in 2016 and will be one of only four in the world.

The detector will be capable of detecting and measuring gravity waves which are believed to be the after effects of the big bang. The detector whcih uses two diagonal lasers will be so sensitive that it will be capable of measuring gravitational waves that were produced micro seconds after the big bang.

Scientists from the University of Western Australia will be leading the project.

With the possibility of securing the SKA telescope and now this gravity detector, Western Australia and Perth are well positioned to lead astronomy in the Southern Hemisphere.

Distributed generation of renewable energy is off to a rocky start, but it's finally making some headway.

The research side is looking good. The $28 billion request in the US president's FY 2011 budget for the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy includes large increases for programs including wind, weatherisation, smart grid technologies, and solar — plus $58 million for National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) infrastructure and $50 million to stimulate clean energy education.

An additional $300 million would support the Advanced Research Project Agency — Energy (ARPA-E) initiative. Modeled after the DARPA program that resulted in the Internet, ARPA-E will fund the fundamental research to incubate the energy grid of the future, what Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe termed the Enernet.

Yes, this is about the US, but we live in their shadow & adopt their technologies. The Internet was invented there but we all benefit.

It seems that most people, even intelligent and well-informed people, are confused about the difference between the Internet and the Web. No one has expressed this misunderstanding more clearly than Tom Wolfe in Hooking Up:

I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone to get hold of your stock broker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with. That one thing the Internet does and only that. The rest is Digibabble.

This confusion between the network and the services that it first enabled is a natural mistake. Most early customers of electricity believed that they were buying electric lighting. That first application was so compelling that it blinded them to the bigger picture of what was possible.  Read on

Aboriginal culture is proving to be one of Australia's most successful cultural exports. The digiridoo is played on the streets of Amsterdam, London & Tokyo by street buskers and the top Digiridoo Youtube clip has had more than 900,000 views. Art by traditional aboriginal painters fetches more than triple the revenue collected by any other Australian painting art form & is collected & hung by serious national galleries accross the world.

We hear about corrupt politicians all the time and in this regard Western Australia is no different to the rest of the world. If you've ever wondered where the following quote comes from, follow the link to the following Economist article.

The psychology of power. Absolutely. Power corrupts, but it corrupts only those who think they deserve it.